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Tombstones are a mechanism to detect dangling pointers and mitigate the problems they can cause in computer programs. Dangling pointers can appear in certain computer programming languages, e.g. C, C++ and assembly languages. A tombstone is a structure that acts as an intermediary between a pointer and its target, often heap-dynamic data in memory.
Furthermore, pointers of different sizes can alias accesses to the same memory, causing problems that are unchecked by the compiler. Even when data size and pointer representation match, however, compilers can rely on the non-aliasing constraints to perform optimizations that would be unsafe in the presence of disallowed aliasing.
In the C programming language, restrict is a keyword, introduced by the C99 standard, [1] that can be used in pointer declarations. By adding this type qualifier, a programmer hints to the compiler that for the lifetime of the pointer, no other pointer will be used to access the object to which it points. This allows the compiler to make ...
Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++, C++/CLI and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software ; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available in both trialware and freeware forms.
In C++ pointers to non-static members of a class can be defined. If a class C has a member T a then &C::a is a pointer to the member a of type T C::*. This member can be an object or a function. [16] They can be used on the right-hand side of operators .* and ->* to access the corresponding member.
In computer science, pointer analysis, or points-to analysis, is a static code analysis technique that establishes which pointers, or heap references, can point to which variables, or storage locations. It is often a component of more complex analyses such as escape analysis. A closely related technique is shape analysis.
At various times, Microsoft has said P-code is an abbreviation for either packed code [7] or pseudo code. [8] Microsoft P-code was used in Visual C++ and Visual Basic. Like other P-code implementations, Microsoft P-code enabled a more compact executable at the expense of slower execution.
One commonly encountered difference is C being more weakly-typed regarding pointers. Specifically, C allows a void* pointer to be assigned to any pointer type without a cast, while C++ does not; this idiom appears often in C code using malloc memory allocation, [9] or in the passing of context pointers to the POSIX pthreads API, and other ...